n the sweetest springs of life! And, then, how soon
such unhappy men begin to see themselves reproduced and multiplied in
their children. How many fathers see, with a secret bitterness of spirit
that never can be told, their own worst vices of character and conduct
reproduced and perpetuated in their children! One father sees his
constitutional and unextirpated sensuality coming out in the gluttony,
the drunkenness, and the lust of his son; while another sees his pride,
his moroseness, his kept-up anger and his cruelty all coming out in one
who is his very image. While many a mother sees her own youthful
shallowness, frivolity, untruthfulness, deceit and parsimony in her
daughter, for whose morality and religion she would willingly give up her
own soul. And then our children, who were to be our staff and our crown,
so early take their own so wilful and so unfilial way in life. They
betake themselves, for no reason so much as just for intended
disobedience and impudent independence, to other pursuits and pleasures,
to other political and ecclesiastical parties than we have ever gone
with. And when it is too late we see how we have again mishandled and
mismanaged our families as we had mishandled and mismanaged our own
youth, till it is only one grey head here and another there that does not
go down to the grave under a crushing load of domestic sorrow. When the
best things in life are so poisoned by sin, how bitter is that poison!

If an unpoisoned youth and an unembittered family life are some of the
sweetest things this earth can taste, then a circle of close and true and
dear friendships does not come very far behind them. Rutherford had
plenty of trouble in his family life that he used to set down to the sins
of his youth; and then the way he poisoned so many of his best
friendships by his so poisonous party spirit is a humbling history to
read. He quarrelled irreconcilably with his very best friends over
matters that were soon to be as dead as Aaron's golden calf, and which
never had much more life or decency in them. The matters were so small
and miserable over which Rutherford quarrelled with such men as David
Dickson and Robert Blair that I could not interest you in them at this
time of day even if I tried. They were as parochial, as unsubstantial,
and as much made up of prejudice and ill-will as were some of those
matters that have served under Satan to poison so often our own private
and public and r